Sunday, January 31, 2016

Learn How to Read!

Call the number on your TV.

USA Today article about teachers being taught outdated methods for teaching students how to read. These obsolete methods include memorizing and learning how a word or sentence relates to the context of the the whole text.

USA Today says that out of 75 colleges, "Monday's study finds that only 11 colleges currently teach teachers about all five so-called scientific components of reading, which dictate that students should learn reading through phonics, vocabulary and similar means. "

Phonics is wonderful for vocalizing parts of written text that correspond to common pronunciation patterns, but I'm not sure what exactly that has to do with learning what the written text is trying to state. My belief is that when learning a language it is best to treat the written part of the language as being separate from the spoken language. Of course, there are similarities, but often the two may not have much in common. Don't sweat the odd words that get mispronounced, what is more important is what it means.

A linguistic professor once showed how most people are unaware of how their spoken patterns differ from what they they write down. In fact many people get upset or mad when they find out how they pronounce or construct sentence has little bearing on how they write.